Growing our Dinner

I seem to have burned myself out of baking our own bread at this point.  I have (gasp!) been buying bread at our local grocery store ever since we returned from Disney World two weeks ago.  Granted, we have had a couple of emergent and stressful situations come up in that time, so I don't feel too bad about it, but I can definitely tell the difference between how I feel when consuming something I made myself and the products that I find on the store shelves.  (Primarily, feeling "full" and "nourished" with my from-scratch bread.)  This is not to mention the fact that the bread that I used to buy every week (cough....HEB brand 100% Whole Wheat Bread, I am looking at you....cough) is now carrying a label indicating that it is processed in a facility using nuts and tree nuts!  Blerg!  I had to switch to the more expensive, name-brand bread and even that has an ingredient list that might as well be called an ingredient paragraph.  I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that I was feeling particularly lazy in regards to baking as of late and her response was, "yeah, you are so lazy!  You don't want to bake ALL of your family's bread for the week!"  I know how silly it sounds; I want to get back to baking everything, and now I know that I probably need to get back to it, but the shine is off and, right now at least, it seems like work.  Anyway.....

Despite not baking the past couple of weeks, I have been productive, specifically with my garden plot in our local community garden.  It is actually coming along fairly well, as opposed to the last season, when the basil that had been planted there before over-seeded and basically took over everything.  I was able to harvest some vegetables yesterday afternoon and my, were they gorgeous!  We got three bell peppers, two little crowns of broccoli, tons of rainbow and red Swiss chard, plus a little dinosaur kale and curly leaf kale.  I cooked all of the greens last night with a little olive oil, sea salt, crushed garlic cloves and crushed red pepper flakes.  They were delicious and I can't really describe how proud I was that I had grown them all myself!  Our garden still has a ways to go (namely, we need to finish planting what seems to be a huge space), but it is really something spectacular to be able to cultivate the ground and consume the "fruits" (or veggies, in this case) of your labor.  Last night, we also enjoyed some really, really late harvest tomatoes (our weather here in Texas has been pretty warm this year; I think the first real freeze is supposed to come in this evening), sliced and sprinkled with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.  They were juicy and exploded with a lovely little taste of summer on our balmy "winter" evening.  In the next few weeks, it looks like I should have more greens to work with, not to mention purple cauliflower, leeks, fennel and, hopefully soon, some beets as well.  I am definitely still more cook than gardener, but it would seem that my thumb, previously black, has begun to show signs of going green!